This workshop was designed for engineers who want to build out an Alexa skill for the first time. For more details and video join our Slack channel: https://goo.gl/qBZxbt and Meetup group: https://www.meetup.com/voice-tech-to/.

1. Connected Lab
March 5, 2018
370 King St W #300 Toronto, ON M5V 1J9 / (647) 478-7493
Guy Tonye with the ❤ and support from Polina Cherkashyna and Tim Bettridge
Build your (first) Alexa Skill

2. Yours truly
Guy TONYE
Software engineer at
Connected Lab
Skill Summary: SOA, Backend Services, Databases, Front-end.
Other technologies/skills: Python, Django, PHP, Symfony,
MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, IBM Bluemix, OAuth 2.0,
JavaScript, JQuery, Node.js, React.js, Angular JS.
School(s): HEC Paris - Computer Science, Epitech Paris -
Computer Science.
Employers/projects:

3. Contents
1. Introduction
2. Create the skill
3. Create the fulfillment
web service
4. Test the skill on the
device
5. Summary

4. Introduction

5. The idea
Existing solutions
Amazon released the Flash
Briefing Skills for Alexa which
allows news providers to
surface snippets of news to
users.
Users can listen to them by
choosing the sources of news
in the Alexa companion app
and then saying “Alexa what is
my Flash Briefing?”
User insights
When conducting user
interviews on a subset of Flash
Briefing Skills, we found out
that:
• Users don’t want to manually
select news sources, they
prefer to search like on
Google.
• Users are looking for 3-5 the
top headlines only.
• Users want a bullet-point
summary rather than the full
piece of news.
• Users are interested in
having the full article sent to
the phone.
Understanding user needs
Staying up to date with the
current events is one of the
primary “jobs” on smart
speakers.

6. Users
Alexa
enabled
device
Amazon
Skill provider
web service
How an Alexa third party Skill works
1 2
35 4
1 User invokes the skill and asks something.
2
The user request is sent to the VPA which
analyses and constructs a request for the Skill
fulfilment web service.
3
The web service processes the request
and sends a response to the VPA.
4 The VPA proxies the response to the device.
5 The device gives the response to the user.

7. Users
Alexa
enabled
device
Amazon
Skill provider
web service
‘Tailor News’ third party Skill
User asks for news on a topic
Finds the top headline on the
topic and returns the title and
the summary
Reads the title
of the headline
and the summary
of the article
Tailor News will be an Alexa Skill that allows the user to search for
the top headline on a topic and hear a short summary of this news piece

8. Users
Alexa
enabled
device
Amazon
Skill provider
web service
Under the hood
on developer.amazon.com
configure the intents,
utterances, slots
On console.aws.amazon.com
create a lambda function
that leverages newsapi.org
and smmry.com to fetch
a headline and its summary

9. Create the skill

10. Users
Alexa
enabled
device
Amazon
Skill provider
web service
Create the skill
The first step to create the Skill is to define the dialog between the user and Alexa

11. Alexa, open Tailor News
technology
The Wyze cam Is A $20 Security Camera, And It Just Got Better
I've never owned a security camera, so don't quote me as an expert,
but I’ve been reading some Wyze Cam reviews this afternoon and they're a little astonishing:
a good, functional, easy-to-use, and feature-rich streaming security camera for $20.
Well, now there's a sequel.
On which topic do you want news?
Happy path
We design the “happy path”.
It is the ideal dialogue between the user
and the skill. For Tailor News, the user opens
the skill, he chooses the topic and the skill
returns the title and the summary.

12. Alexa, open Tailor News
technology
The Wyze cam Is A $20 Security Camera, And It Just Got Better
I've never owned a security camera, so don't quote me as an expert,
but I’ve been reading some Wyze Cam reviews this afternoon and they're a little astonishing:
a good, functional, easy-to-use, and feature-rich streaming security camera for $20.
Well, now there's a sequel.
On which topic do you want news?
Intents
We identify the intents.
They represent what the user wants
from the Skill. For tailor news, the user
wants the top headline on a given topic.

13. Alexa, open Tailor News
technology
The Wyze cam Is A $20 Security Camera, And It Just Got Better
I've never owned a security camera, so don't quote me as an expert,
but I’ve been reading some Wyze Cam reviews this afternoon and they're a little astonishing:
a good, functional, easy-to-use, and feature-rich streaming security camera for $20.
Well, now there's a sequel.
On which topic do you want news?
Slots
We identify the slots.
They represent the types for which the user
will supply the values during the dialog.
For tailor news, the skill will capture the topic.

14. 4Build the model.
3Create the slots and the
slots’ values, ids and
synonyms.
Add the slot to the
utterances in each
intent.
On developer.amazon.com
Create the skill
Create the skill.
Choose the skill name,
the type, and the
invocation name.
1 2
5
Create the intents.
Choose the utterances.
Configure the fulfilment
endpoints, the policies
and the skill
description.

15. Create the fulfillment web service

16. Users
Alexa
enabled
device
Amazon
Skill provider
web service
Fulfilment web service
After creating the skill we can design the web service that will process
the request crafted by the VPA and that contains the intents and the slots values

17. Alexa, open tailor-news
technology
The Wyze cam Is A $20 Security Camera, And It Just Got Better
I've never owned a security camera, so don't quote me as an expert,
but I’ve been reading some Wyze Cam reviews this afternoon and they're a little astonishing:
a good, functional, easy-to-use, and feature-rich streaming security camera for $20.
Well, now there's a sequel.
On which topic do you want news?
Fulfilment web service
The Fulfilment web service builds the response
that Alexa serves to the user.
For Tailor News the response is a text read by
the device with the title and the summary of
the top headline on the topic.

18. 3Use ask-cli to manage
the lambda code.
On console.aws.amazon.com
Create the adapter (fulfilment web service on AWS)
Create the lambda.
1 2
4
Configure the lambda
(permissions,
environment variables).
Write tests.

19. Test the skill on the device

20. Summary

21. Users
Alexa
enabled
device
Amazon
Skill provider
web service
End to end
On developer.amazon.com,
we configure a skill that Alexa will use when the user says:
“Alexa, ask Tailor News to give me news on tech”
On console.aws.amazon.com:
we create and configure a lambda with a code that
fetches the top headline from newsapi.org, creates
a summary using smmry.com and crafts a response
for the VPA.

22. Following the “Tailor
News” product life
cycle.
1. Design sprint for
voice
2. User validation
3. Engineering
workshop #2
4. Launch & promotion
5. Monetization
What’s next?

23. Join our Slack for
videos, news and
research.
Speakers are
welcome! (As well as
ideas for speakers)
Bring your friends, who
would be interested in
Voice.
Let’s grow the community together!
Suggest a venue.
Voice Tech TO can
happen anywhere.

24. Thank you!